My Wife's Abortion Was Hard, But Others May Soon Have It Much Harder

Anton Schlesinger and his wife Nicole drove to the abortion clinic in their hometown of Dallas. It was a sweltering day in June 2013. Four protesters waved their "Abortion Is Murder" posters at the car as they pulled into the parking lot. "It's not fair for them to pass judgment on us," Anton said, trying his best to reassure, as Nicole wrapped her arms around her stomach. They got out of the car and tightly held each other's hands as they brushed past the sign-wavers and into the building.

Anton opened the waiting-room door to find the space packed with dozens of patients. Most of the women had men sitting beside them. As Nicole and Anton made their way to the last open seats, he tried not to look too long at any one person. Accidental eye contact would've been too much, so he trained his eyes on the small televisions dotting the quiet room, wondering about the other men there.

Is that her dad?, he thought, glancing at one pair who were significantly different in age. I wonder what their story is, he pondered, darting his eyes toward another young couple. His gaze fell back on his wife, the only woman in the room who was visibly pregnant.

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Anton never thought he'd be sitting in an abortion clinic with a wife nearly 22 weeks into her pregnancy.

"Abortions happen to women but men don't realize it affects them, too. It's their wives, their daughters, their sisters. It's something that affects us all."

According to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 700,000 legal induced abortions were performed in the U.S. in 2012. But it's rare to hear women speak about their experiences and almost unheard of for men talk about it.

"It's a real taboo subject. People don't want to be judged," Anton says. "Guys need to talk about it a lot more. Abortions happen to women but men don't realize it affects them, too. It's their wives, their daughters, their sisters. It's something that affects us all."

Today, the Supreme Court will hear arguments for Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, an historic case challenging a 2013 ruling from a lower Texas court that could impose new requirements that would effectively leave just 10 abortion clinics in Texas.

Source: The New York Times

It's the first abortion case the Supreme Court has heard in a decade and will set a precedent that determines whether or not other states can enact their own stricter abortion regulations. This week, more than 100 women submitted briefs to the court to oppose the Texas law.

Anton says he and Nicole first decided to tell their own story publicly a few months after their abortion. Until now, that meant Nicole stepping forward. Before he'd gone through the situation himself, Anton had never heard another man's abortion story. Now he's ready to share his.

***

Anton and Nicole's families joke that Nicole was the first girl he ever met. Their parents were friends in Dallas, and soon after Anton was born, a 3-year-old Nicole met and held the tiny newborn. A photo of the moment still exists. The pair lost touch, but reconnected nearly three decades later, in 2011. Anton, who was living in Los Angeles at the time, came home to Dallas for Mother's Day. One night, while out for drinks with some old friends at a bar, he saw Nicole walk in the door.

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They recognized each other immediately, and she sat down next to him to catch up. They ended up talking late into the night about their lives, which had taken them away from Dallas. They'd both moved to New York then Los Angeles. Nicole had recently returned to their hometown after a divorce and was teaching pilates for a living. Anton was smitten.

He told his mom about running into Nicole, and their instant connection. She told him he'd slept in Nicole's hand-me-down crib as a baby. The next day, he flew back to L.A.

He and Nicole began talking, and then dating, and then visiting one another. Soon enough, Anton moved back to Texas. A year after their fateful run-in, he proposed. Three months after that, they were married. A few months after that, over dinner, Nicole told Anton she wanted to start trying to conceive.

***

Nicole got pregnant right away.

The first trimester went smoothly. They began referring to the fetus as Tutu, a gender-neutral nickname Nicole made up. Nicole didn't have morning sickness, only the occasional headache and extreme food cravings. "I was constantly hungry," says Nicole. "I remember telling Anton so many times to drive like a monster on fire to the Mexican restaurant."

She signed up for an email newsletter that said how big the fetus was week-to-week. They'd mark each update with a walk around the lake to talk about what they wanted their family to be like. They had a room in the house that would become a nursery, but they held off picking out furniture until they found out the gender. Anton pored through an advice book for expectant dads.

"The technician said, 'The femur is measuring really short.' I'm like, 'Our boy's just going to be a point guard. It's fine!' But she didn't respond to my attempts at making light of the situation."

The morning before the appointment where they'd get their first sonogram that, at 19-and-a-half weeks, would reveal the gender, the couple was giddy. When they got into the examination room, Anton took photos and recorded videos of Nicole on his phone.

The technician pulled up the sonogram and told them they'd be having a boy. But then, suddenly, the mood in the room changed.

"I remember it being really quiet," Anton says. "The technician eventually said, 'The femur is measuring really short.' I'm like, 'Our boy's just going to be a point guard. It's fine!' But the technician wasn't really responding to my attempts at making light of the situation."

The doctor came in and looked at the black-and-white image moving on the small screen. She reiterated that things weren't measuring correctly and recommended that they see a specialist at the hospital. Nicole left the appointment crying.

Twenty-four hours later, they met with the fetal care specialist. "Ah man, it was tough," Anton says. "We went in for another sonogram. The doctor was nice, but her delivery was ice-cold. She said, 'Things aren't measuring correctly— the femur, the arms, the head, the heart. There's a constellation of abnormalities.' My whole confidence got really bleak. All of the sudden, the conversation turned to, 'You need to start considering what your options are.' It took a moment for what that meant to sink in."

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"The doctor brought up terminating the pregnancy," Nicole says. "But she recommended that we first have an amniocentesis," a process by which amniotic fluid is extracted from the uterus for testing. "She made it clear that the amnio would help us understand what was causing the abnormalities. Regardless, the abnormalities existed one way or another. It was a 10-day turnaround for the results, which was a horribly long time to wait."

As they made their way out of the exam room, Anton led Nicole to a group of seats in the hospital waiting room. "We sat down, just completely deflated, and we had a real heart-to-heart talk," he says.

They don't remember who first broached the topic of terminating the pregnancy. "I think that we were feeling the same thing," Nicole says. "We said 'If there's no chance for this baby to have any happiness in life, then we have to terminate the pregnancy. We can't bring a child into this world only to suffer.' It was a very clear-headed moment. There weren't tears then. It was a huge gift that we were on the same page."

***

On the way home, they called their parents to tell them the news and asked everyone to gather at their house. When Anton's mom got out of the car, she was sobbing, barely able to walk up the stairs to get inside. Once everyone sat down, they told their parents they'd decided to wait until the amnio results were back, just so they had as much information as they could.

"There were two situations in front of us, and both of them were horrible," says Nicole. "One was that we brought a child into the world who would never have a normal life and would probably only live a few months. And then there was this other possibility, which I think we all felt very, very grateful for, that we could terminate the pregnancy. Our parents were all very supportive."

For the next 10 days, they waited. Nicole's expanding stomach was already attracting questions and well wishes, so she chose not to leave the house—it was too painful to deal with comments from her pilates clients and strangers at the grocery store. Anton continued going to work at his marketing firm, unable to concentrate on even the smallest task. "Everything else seemed superficial and not important," he says.

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In the midst of that waiting period, Anton had to go to Austin on a work trip. When he got to the airport, he decided to confide in his colleague, who was also a friend. "As we were waiting to board the airplane, it was on my mind so much. I had to tell somebody," he says. "He just said, 'Oh my gosh, I cant believe it,' which was comforting. He was just there for me." It was the only non-family member he told.

When Anton returned home, they got a call from their doctor telling them that all of the tests they'd run didn't indicate any chromosomal abnormalities. So Nicole received an MRI and a second sonogram. With both sets of parents in the exam room, they found out that, in the short amount of time since their last checkup, the fetus's condition had worsened. Now there was fluid coming into the lungs and the rear cerebellum was absent. It was unclear how much longer the fetus would survive, and if the baby was carried to term, how long he would live.

"We'd made our decision the first time we saw the fetal specialist, but we hadn't committed," Anton says. "At this appointment, after the MRI, we were confident, ready to move forward and make appointments with the abortion clinic."

The hospital told them where they could have the procedure done—thankfully, it was just a few miles away—but warned that their timeframe was narrowing. They were at nearly 22 weeks and, at the time, Texas law didn't allow abortions after 24 weeks.

Anton began researching abortion laws online and came across a live stream of Texas Senator Wendy Davis, who happened to be in the midst of her filibuster to block a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks and impose further restrictions on abortion clinics. Davis called the bill a "raw abuse of power" and read testimony from opponents of the legislation. Anton emailed the link to Nicole.

Anton researched other states that would allow abortions after 20 weeks in case Texas law suddenly changed, trying to figure out if a trip to New Mexico or Colorado was feasible. "We were thinking, If they passed this law, are we going to have to go out-of-state?" Anton says. "It's not very clear when, after passage, a law is actually enacted. I Googled everything I could." They didn't have to book flights to another state: Though Davis' filibuster was unsuccessful and lawmakers approved the ban, the couple still had time before it took effect.

***

On their first trip to the clinic the doctor explained that the procedure was a three-day, three-part process. "The doctor comforted and consoled us, and provided information that we needed to hear," Anton says. "He made me feel comfortable that we were in good hands."

For the second appointment, Anton left work to meet Nicole at the clinic. Nicole was led to a back room, where she would receive an injection to end the pregnancy. Anton wasn't allowed to go back with her, so he sat outside in the waiting room for close to 45 minutes. He alternately scrolled through his phone and stared at the wall-mounted televisions playing the same movies on repeat. But mostly he ran through scenarios about how Nicole, just a few rooms over, was feeling.

"I had no idea how she was going to be when she came out of that room," Anton says. Choking up, he adds: "But I remember that she was at peace. I thought she was going to be a lot worse. After that, we wished for Tutu to be at peace and we said a prayer to each other. We just said our blessings."

That night, Nicole's water broke.

Anton called the hotline number the clinic had given them and a nurse on the other end assured him that Nicole would be OK. He went to the drugstore to buy Nicole Depends, winding his way through the aisles with his phone cradled on his shoulder as his dad on the other end tried to calm him down. "I was in a full panic," Anton says. "I really wasn't ready for that, and I couldn't believe we weren't going to see the doctor for another 12 hours. I didn't know if her health was going to be at risk." It wasn't; this was a standard part of the process.

For the final appointment, the extraction, Nicole was given a sedative. When she made her way woozily out of the exam room for the third and last time, Anton rushed to give her a hug and whispered, "I love you."

***

Anton didn't know where they should go or what they should do as the drove away, but Nicole did. "We went to IHOP. We never go there, but she just wanted to," Anton says. "We got pancakes and tried to remain positive. We'd been through all the emotions. We were drained."

For both Anton and Nicole, the days after the abortion are a blur. They had the remains cremated and scattered the ashes under a tree they planted the day of their wedding.

They remained in constant contact, IMing while Anton was at work, and talking late into the night. "Those first weeks for me revolved around making sure Nicole was going to be OK," Anton says. "They were not easy. I was so obsessed with making sure she was OK."

A few months later, Nicole decided to go public with her story. She had long ago planned to read a piece she'd written called "Bun in the Oven," in which she talk about what it was like to be pregnant, at a story-telling series in Dallas called Oral Fixation. She decided to go through with the reading and talk about the abortion instead.

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Nicole got overwhelming support online from women who shared their own stories. She joined a Facebook support group for women who'd had abortions. "We started to find and talk to a lot of people that had gone through this, too," she says. "Which was shocking to us, because we hadn't ever talked to others about it at all."

While most friends and family members reached out to offer comfort, not everyone understood their decision. "There were some people who said they supported us, but I could tell there was some judgment underneath," Anton says. "We understood that certain individuals have strong religious beliefs, and no matter what we were going through that they still didn't agree."

Meanwhile, Anton "forged ahead," he says. "I put my head down and kept going. That's sometimes a good trait and sometimes it's not." After opening up to his colleague on the business flight, the two talked about what had happened "here and there, a little bit."

Nicole says, "He was trying to be very strong for me. But I would be talking about how painful it was and how much pain I was in and he would say, 'I was feeling it, too,' and crumple into tears. I think he was afraid of my feelings because they were so intense. He was afraid his feelings would take us down completely."

***

They tried to get pregnant after a few months. Though it didn't happen as quickly the second time, soon enough Nicole got back a positive test, and, at 8 weeks, she had a miscarriage. They refused to allow the setback to dampen their resolve.

When they got pregnant a third time and made it to the 18-week checkup, they held their breath. But they felt a wave of relief when the doctor told them the sonogram looked good. "That was major," Anton says. On November 10, 2015, exactly two years and one week after Tutu's due date, Nicole gave birth to a healthy baby girl.

"When she came out, and the doctor was looking her up and down and doing the measurements on the table, they were like, 'She's healthy,'" Anton says. "But it really wasn't until I held her for the first time that I first fully embraced that we had a healthy baby."

Anton says that, in the end, the experience brought the two closer together. "Nicole is stronger than I ever thought she could be. Her confidence is so strong. She's more beautiful as a result. She's able to be who she is and is able to come through adversity," Anton says. "Honestly, as bad as the experience was, it's made our marriage so much better."

They plan to tell their daughter about the first pregnancy. "We want to be able to tell her when she's old enough that she would have had an older brother," Anton says. "We'll tell her that Mommy and Daddy had to make a really hard decision that was best for Tutu."

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"Nicole is stronger than I ever thought she could be. Her confidence is so strong. She's more beautiful as a result."

But for now, they're anxiously awaiting the Supreme Court ruling, which will come in May or June, the outcome of which could make the logistics of the decision they made even more difficult for other Texans.

"By closing these facilities, it's creating less opportunity for people to get the care that they need," Anton says. "We feel we need to create more awareness around the fact that it can be a real struggle at 22 weeks. We're fortunate enough that we could have afforded it somehow if we had to travel out of state. It would've been tough, but we could have gotten support to do it. But it still would have been extremely traumatizing, multitudes worse than it was already. I couldn't imagine having to do this procedure in another state and not have access to our family-support network. It's already such a huge emotional toll. I don't think anyone should have to go through that." Hopefully, no one ever will.

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